[hardtke]

I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.

[jerf]

Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time, you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you don't have to start there. There's no need for a "big bang" event.

By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car, because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.

[hardtke]

By simply adding autonomous cars to the current infrastructure, it doesn't improve peoples lives in a directly obvious way. They can't go any faster, and traffic does not get reduced. Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as fast. Otherwise, I rather enjoy driving.

[jerf]

It benefits the person owning the driverless car, who can now do something other than drive while still moving from A to B. You seem to be insisting on thinking collectively, but that's not how people decide or act. It only has to benefit the owner for it to sell.

The rich will be the last to let their human driven cars go, but they'll also obviously be the first to adopt them, once they're safe. In this case, the rich other than the ultra rich, who can already afford cars-they-don't-drive... giving further evidence that, yeah, people want this.

Your argument would, for instance, seem to explain why cars never took off... why, one car hardly benefits anyone. There aren't even any car suitable roads, after all, and think of all the horses the smelly, loud thing will spook! But... that's not how people buy things.

The collective benefits come later. The individual benefits come first.

[uncoder0]

The teams Nissan and Google are using to develop this technology already dealt with the problems of a highway/city populated with human pedestrians and drivers. High speed linked autonomous cars are certainly not the fist step of this transition.[1]

[1]http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

[waffle_ss]

Why would they have to be linked? If I were building autonomous vehicles, I wouldn't trust information from other vehicles in the same way I don't trust a human driver to use their turn signal properly. The vehicle should rely only on its sensor data and drive defensively.